Move over, Einstein: Machines will take it from here

Evolutionary computing lets anyone discover new laws of nature – but does this mean the end of science as we know it?

IT WAS long after midnight when Michael Schmidt noticed a strangely familiar equation pop up on his monitor. His computer was crunching the data from an experiment to measure the chaotic motion of a double pendulum, a type that has one swinging arm hanging from another.

Schmidt recorded this movement using a motion tracking camera which fed numbers into his computer. What he was looking for was an equation describing the motion of the pendulums.

Initially, the task looked hopeless. When a double pendulum moves chaotically, its arms swing in a way that is almost impossible to predict, with seemingly no pattern whatsoever. For a human, finding an equation for this would be almost impossible. And yet the computer found something. To Schmidt, a PhD student studying computer science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, it was a hugely significant moment. “It’s probably the most exciting thing that has happened to me in science,” he says.

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That’s because Schmidt’s computer had found one of the immutable laws of nature&colon; the law of conservation of energy, which says you can never add or take energy away from a system. What had taken many scientists hundreds of years to discover took his computer just one day (see diagram).

Schmidt and his supervisor Hod Lipson had hit upon a new way of doing science, no less. Their method bodes well for areas of research thought to be too …